Anxiously Attached Anonymous

The meeting takes place at 7PM sharp in the basement of a church that looks like it lost faith long before the rest of us did.

Even God stopped returning its calls.

A half-dead Keurig sits on a folding table beside a tray of stale donuts from 7-Eleven and a stack of tiny cups that nobody trusts structurally.

Metal folding chairs are neatly arranged in a circle.

On the door, taped crookedly, hangs a sheet of printer paper:

A.A.A.
Anxiously Attached Anonymous

One day at time, crashouts.

The room is packed.

A finance bro built like a vending machine keeps replaying his ex's Instagram stories under the table like he's monitoring stock futures before market open.

A girl with smeared eyeliner stares motionless at her Apple Watch after being left on delivered for six hours.

Somebody near the back keeps opening Find My iPhone, closing it, then reopening it like maybe this time the little blue dot will come with context. Or accountability. Or both.

Another guy is deep in a situationship-induced psychosis because she sent him this:

😭😭😭

and he "doesn't know what tone those tears represent."

Honestly? Fair concern.

A woman near the front adjusts her glasses and looks down at a clipboard.

“Before we begin,” she says, “if anybody spent more than twenty minutes trying to figure out who was in the reflection of a car window on somebody's story this week… please remember this is a judgment-free space.”

Silence.

Then somewhere in the circle, a man loudly whispers:

“…it was definitely a man though.”

A few people nod solemnly. Then the room goes still.

My turn.

I stand up a little too fast and the Styrofoam cup crackles in my hand.

“Hi,” I say.

“I'm Nicolas… and I have anxious attachment.”

Hi Nicolas.

There's always one guy in these meetings who says it with a little too much excitement. Like he's been waiting all week for another emotionally unstable civilian to join the program.

A folding chair groans somewhere to my right.

The room smells like vanilla creamer, nicotine, and nervous systems held together with duct tape.

I clear my throat.

“Well… what can I say.”

“I was abandoned at birth.”

A few people nod immediately.

Too immediately.

“Technically left for dead by my drug-addicted mother,” I say. “Which honestly feels like a very aggressive way to enter the world.”

That gets a laugh.

Good.

The room relaxes a little.

People think anxious attachment means you're clingy. Like you just really enjoy texting.

I wish it were that adorable.

For me it's more like… somewhere in my adolescence, my brain finally realized:

Someone whose entire biological responsibility was keep this child alive saw me fresh out of the wrapper and said:

Respectfully… I'm gonna head out.

Once that cold little realization installed itself into my operating system, I became obsessed with understanding what makes people tick. What makes them capable of doing unfathomable things.

That was the only way I could make peace with what happened to me.

By the time I was 15, I was already hard at work.

Attachment theory. Personality disorders. Trauma responses. Defense mechanisms.

I was consuming college-level psychology the way my friends were consuming PlayStation games and MTV.

At some point, curiosity turned into coping.

Because if I could just understand the why behind abandonment… maybe I wouldn't feel so haunted by the how of it.

Eventually my obsession mutated. I needed to understand why existence itself exists.

Why loneliness exists.

Why no two people can ever fully experience the exact same reality.

Heidegger ruined my seventh grade lunch period with that concept.

Because on one hand, it freed me.

It meant that most of life's problems were actually just people attempting to bridge the gap between their own subjective realities.

But it also introduced this deeply unsettling idea:

Maybe completely understanding someone— or even being understood by someone — was fundamentally impossible.

At that point, I was feeling existential dread. My friends were smoking weed behind the bleachers.

Different journeys.

Looking back on it now, I think context became my version of reassurance.

Some people learned safety through affection.

I learned it through information overload.

Which becomes a highly annoying habit to bring into adult relationships.

People love calling this behavior toxic now.

And listen — sometimes?

Fair.

I've overwhelmed people while trying to feel safe with them.

I've pressed conversations past their natural expiration date because somewhere in my body, unresolved tension still registers as immediate danger.

I've turned small inconsistencies into full internal investigations.

Not because I enjoy conflict.

Because conflict, to me, has never just been conflict.

Conflict means something shifted.

Something became uncertain.

And uncertainty has always felt expensive.

My brain wants things resolved.

So the second something feels off, I start trying to find it.

I'll explain. Then overexplain.

Then reopen the conversation because technically we still haven't identified the actual issue yet.

At some point I'm texting only because the conversation still being alive feels safer than the conversation ending.

And once that happens, good luck stopping it. I'm in documentation mode now.

What I Meant Earlier.

The Context That Changes Everything.

Wait — I Don't Think My Last Point Landed, Let Me Try Again.

By hour three I'm cross-referencing last seen timestamps, punctuation shifts, that cryptic post from six business days ago, and one suspicious “lol” that suddenly feels worthy of forensic analysis.

—

Somewhere across the circle, a woman quietly whispers:

“Jesus Christ.”

I point at her immediately.

"THANK YOU."

Because finally somebody understands the severity of the situation.

And autism absolutely does not help.

My brain wants systems.

Patterns.

Cause and effect.

But relationships are mostly improvised emotional jazz performed by two people with unresolved childhood trauma and Tinder syndrome.

So I dissect.

I ask follow-up questions like my life depends on it.

I revisit conversations trying to locate the exact moment the atmosphere shifted three degrees to the left.

I'll stalk socials during periods of perceived disconnection too.

Not "hidden-in-the-bushes" stalking.

I have some dignity. Kind of.

More like "visible-from-the-street" style:

• checking the story
• checking the song attached to guage the mood
• checking whether the caption was harmless, passive aggressive, emotionally loaded, or proof that Instagram was specifically designed to torment people with attachment trauma

The guy beside me slowly lowers a half-eaten donut onto his napkin like he just lost his appetite halfway through recognizing himself.

Nobody laughs this time.

That's the thing about emotionally catastrophic people.

We can identify each other instantly.

And honestly?

Breakups make me pathetic. There. I said it.

Pathetic.

At least for the first few days.

I pace around my apartment replaying the scene of the crime.

I think of better arguments in the shower.

I'm embarrsed to miss people but...

A tragic realization hits mid-thought.

What if part of me keeps recreating abandonment on purpose just to see who stays?

The room feels a little different after that.

Someone uncrosses their arms.

The girl in the oversized hoodie finally stops fake-scrolling and lets her phone rest face down on her thigh.

That's how you know something true entered the room.

Not consciously, obviously.

I'm not sitting at home engineering psychological warfare.

But I do think I've made it my life's work to solve the same impossible equation:

How does somebody leave that early?

Immediately.

Before the first words.

Before your own body belonged to you.

Just born… and already experiencing loss.

The room has gone completely still now.

Thirteen emotionally exhausted people stare at the floor like they're all thinking the same thought.

And the thing that really destroys a child — is there was no coherent explanation for it.

Just a woman so high she didn't consciously register bringing me into the world.

Try building secure attachment on top of that legacy.

And the worst part?

I'm the one who has to pay the invoice for her absence.

Because at 35 years old, I still believe people can disappear suddenly, irrationally — without warning. So I've convinced myself that the only way to prevent it is to understand the algorithm that governs it.

So I'll ask one more question.

One more conversation.

Until eventually the relationship starts bending under the weight of all the fear I carried into it.

The old woman near the back finally removes the unlit cigarette from between her fingers.

She points at me slowly like she's about to deliver the final verdict in a courtroom drama.

“You got attachment issues alright,” she says.

“…but damn. You really know yourself.”